News

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/21/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/21/07): 7 Iraqi civilians killed. 15 U.S. soldiers killed this weekend.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

7 people killed today when gunmen attacked a minibus headed for Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,929 – 70,023: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 20 May 2007.

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

At least 15 U.S. soldiers were killed this weekend in Iraq, according to the Associated Press.


3,666: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

107 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

Journalist abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/21/07): So far, $427 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The East Bay Express: Independent again

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By Tim Redmond

The good news — and it’s very good news — is that the East Bay Express is no longer a member of the Village Voice Media chain that owns the SF Weekly. I’m a day late with this news; it’s taken me a bit to process, because our ad director (and my good friend) Jody Colley has left the Guardian to go work with the new ownership. But most of the reports have been upbeat, emphasizing that Express editor Steve Buell and his partners, Hal Brody, Kelly Vance and Bradley Zeve have done a very unsual thing. They’ve taken a chain paper and made it an independent.

And although none of the principals are talking about the price, I think they got it pretty cheap. In essence, the big, bad VVM couldn’t make it in the East Bay, and was forced to bail.

Of course, it’s going to take a while to disentangle the VVM connections. The Express was very much a cog in the borg machine: The website was designed and run by VVM. The movie reviews came from VVM. The accounting and systems were all handled through VVM. And — perhaps most important — the ad sales were closely linked to the SF Weekly.

In fact, the Weekly’s ad materials these days all cite the circulation not of the SF paper but of the combined Weekly and Express, and for a lot of accounts, buying an ad in the Weekly meant a free one (or heavily discounted one) in the Express. So the two were almost like an old-fashioned joint operating agreement. They even ran the same cover story a few months ago.

I suspect on the sales side, that won’t change immediately. There are contracts and deal and money is involved, so I expect the nonsense will continue for a bit. But in the end, I hope and believe the Express will once again be a community-based and community-serving paper. And I wish them all the luck in the world.

Chronicle to slash newsroom staff

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By Steven T. Jones
The San Francisco Chronicle is planning to lay off about a quarter of its editorial staff — 20 managers and 80 rank-and-file journalists — in the next two weeks, according to sources at the paper. Exactly how the cuts will go down and who will be let go is still being worked out by Hearst Corporation in consultation with the union, creating serious anxiety in the newsroom, even though they were told in March that this might be coming. Sources say their union contract requires a two-week notification for staff reductions, so by the end of the month there could be substantially less news gathering going on in the Bay Area and 100 media professionals wondering what’s next. It’s a sad time for journalism in the U.S.
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Media Workers Guild logo

Chronicle to slash newsroom staff

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By Steven T. Jones
The San Francisco Chronicle is planning to lay off about a quarter of its editorial staff — 20 managers and 80 rank-and-file journalists — in the next two weeks, according to sources at the paper. Exactly how the cuts will go down and who will be let go is still being worked out by Hearst Corporation in consultation with the union, creating serious anxiety in the newsroom, even though they were told in March that this might be coming. Sources say their union contract requires a two-week notification for staff reductions, so by the end of the month there could be substantially less news gathering going on in the Bay Area and 100 media professionals wondering what’s next. It’s a sad time for journalism in the U.S.
red1.75.gif
Media Workers Guild logo

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/16/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/16/07): 32 Iraqi civilians were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

32 Iraqi civilians were killed today when a car bomb was detonated in a busy market just outside of Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,796 – 69,850: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 13 May 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/44/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,642: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

107 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/16/07): So far, $426 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Nuts about wine!

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› paulr@sfbg.com


What sort of birthday present do you get for the wine fancier who already has everything: a cellar full of rare and prized bottles, a kitchen drawer with a full complement of cork pulls, a special refrigerator for chilling wine? You might tell yourself that not every wine fancier has everything — yet — but because oenophilia has become such a conspicuous component of lifestyle pornography, of status-consumption culture, the gap between aspiration and acquisition narrows a little every day. If wine in these parts is now a sort of wampum, constantly traded in an informal barter economy, it is still one thing to show up for dinner at somebody else’s house with a bottle of midrange chardonnay or pinot noir and quite another to present the same wine as a gift that’s supposed to signify in its own right.

The situation isn’t hopeless, however, at least for the moment, because at the Ross Valley Winery in San Anselmo, owner and winemaker Paul Kreider has begun turning out half bottles of vin de noix ("wine of nuts," specifically walnuts), a Provencal-style digestif little known in this country. The walnut-infused wine has a portlike presence, with a low center of gravity and some restrained though deep sweetness, but it is a different color and has an extra dimension in the mouth. The color is the easier of the two differences to describe; whereas port is typically a deep ruby hue, the vin de noix looks like a blend of well-aged balsamic vinegar and some kind of winter ale. As for the additional flavor: it is nutty. If there were a dessert version of Kürbiskernöl (the Austrian pumpkinseed oil), it would be something like the vin de noix.

Best of all, for the gift-minded shopper, is the price — $20. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty good deal for what you get. The smallness of the bottle, incidentally, adds to the aura by suggesting that the elixir within is potent and concentrated, a drink to be not quaffed but sipped, thought about, discussed, sipped some more.

And in other news, a reader wrote to remind me (apropos of my recent piece on Portuguese wine) that there is indeed a Portuguese restaurant in the Bay Area other than the Grubstake (if the latter even fully counts). That would be La Salette, on Sonoma’s town square. Obrigado.

Rhymes with work

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johnny@sfbg.com

I have some Björk memories stowed on shelves and in crates. There’s the signed copy of the Sugarcubes’ "Birthday" 12-inch from the days of the group’s English-language interview with Melody Maker, when Björk showed up late and apologized with the immortal first words "I was shitting" (a moment that all who mistook her for a cute elf should have noted). And I’ve got a great teenage Kodak shot of a friend who helped start riot grrrl long before she picked up a guitar, sitting on Björk’s lap.

But whither Björk? Has she indeed withered to nothing but old soulless art zombie bones because Matthew Barney took a flensing knife to her whale of a voice and cut away her personality? Those were the questions a semilapsed Björk maniac and I leaped to the minute her new album, Volta (Atlantic), blasted from his car speakers with its brash yet mannered call to arms, "Earth Intruders." Here it was, a track that united Björk and Timbaland! Ten years ago, swept up by my love for Post and Homogenic (both Elektra; 1995 and 1997) and the late Aaliyah’s even greater One in a Million (Blackground, 1996), I’d have been rapt. Now we both shrugged and wished we could wish ourselves into truly enjoying what we were hearing.

The good news about Volta is that it gets much better as it goes along. The bad news is that it takes a while to get someplace vital or unconventional by Björk’s standards. The arrival occurs when the heavily processed guitar riff and seesawing volume levels of "Declare Independence" kick in and Björk begins issuing commands like a less moldy and more melodic Peaches, a Chick on Speed with pagan fire in her blood, or a Cobra Killer without a sense of the ridiculous. Here, at least and at last, her flag-raising and megaphone-crackling shouts are matched by musical momentum, so that by the end of the track you’d have to be dead not to want to join her cheerleading squad.

She’s spelling out F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M, but in a manner much different from that of the riot grrrl schools with whom she once swam upstream, against dull dude rock currents, though sporting savvier raver gear. Volta‘s glossy color cover art and some of Björk’s comments about the album suggest she’s made a collection of wise party anthems for girls of the next generation. Her dedication to the feminine is there, no doubt, yet her mood and the music surrounding it are — until "Declare Independence" hits — often morose. The Henryk Górecki–influenced horn symphonics of a track such as "The Dull Flame of Desire" were mined a decade ago by Björk’s lesser contemporaries of the time, Lamb, and her duet partner on it, Antony (Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons), engages her in a maddening war of affectations. She has more range and emotion; he should be fined for grievous vibrato abuse. In the end, they’re both stampeded by the drumroll cameo of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. It’s epic, all right.

Elsewhere, Björk occasionally dips into the orientalist waters near where her husband’s recent ship of a movie, Drawing Restraint 9, sank much too slowly. Built around Min Xiao-Fen’s skittering pipa sounds, "I See Who You Are" gives that film’s anatomy lessons a less violent and possibly lesbian twist, staying chilly, while "Hope," another underwhelming collabo with Timbaland, further proves his ego is bigger than his imagination these days. So what’s to love? Before the anarchic blast of "Declare Independence," Volta‘s highlight is "Vertebrae by Vertebrae"; the sinister symphonic dissonance that was Björk’s métier during parts of Homogenic and most of her Dancer in the Dark numbers comes back, and she’s more than ready for it, unleashing her wildest howls. Instead of Górecki, the deathly cloud formations of Alban Berg come to mind during the song’s interludes. But Björk is no naive Lulu — she uses such a scene to try out some primal vocal and back-stretching calisthenics.

Such signs of life are a step in the right direction, away from the nadir of 2004’s Medúlla (Elektra), which was doomed from its conception as an all-vocal album. Björk has a tendency to overestimate her singing range, as any Ella Fitzgerald fan who has heard the Icelandic one try to get through "Like Someone in Love" on sheer winking cuteness can attest to. Fortunately, this same belief in her power has made for some thrilling songs. Volta only has a couple, but a couple are better than none. *

BJÖRK

With Joanna Newsom and Ghost Digital

Sat/19, 7:30 p.m., $26.50–$70.50

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View

(415) 421-TIXS

www.tickets.com

Tattoo you

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CHEAP EATS She had tattooed knuckles. One hand said PORK and the other said CHOP. I expressed my adoration, and she said, "You should see the other ones."

"Should I?" I asked.

She has a girlfriend in Canada. This was not a date but a business meeting.

Business = new favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Pho Clement, between, I think, Third and Fourth avenues on Clement Street. One hundred and seventy things on the menu, not counting appetizers and sandwiches.

Over two bowls of soup big enough to paddle two small canoes in, I said to my new friend Pork Chop, "What else ya got?"

"Bacon," she said. I think she said it was on her stomach, but I kind of passed out at that point, and when I came to we were making whole different sentences.

Something about Michigan. Turns out, thanks to Pork Chop’s encouragement, I am going to go there this summer for that wimmin’s music festival. Pork Chop works in the kitchen and has been attending the festival for six or seven years. Says it has changed her life.

I’m sure it will change mine too. For one thing, I won’t be as pretty as I am now, what with black eyes, broken teeth, and every manner of structural damage.

Oy, the things we do for a story, eh, fellow hard news reporters and investigative journalists? I tell you. I for one am not a fan of pain or mosquito bites. Yet there I will be, in Michigan in August, getting my ass kicked by both bugs and backward-thinking lesbian feminist separatists. Ah, but someone’s gotta go see what these girls are having for dinner, and there’s no question I’m the tranny for the job.

Oh: I say backward-thinking because their definition of wimmins is stuck all the way back on what Mr. Doctor had to say about it, overriding all present tense appearances to the contrary. Because everyone knows that the last-century medical profession, or in other words, "the Man," interprets reality more accurately and certainly more definitively than we do, its living and kicking and messy subjects, prone as we are to the pesky revisionism of tick tick time, the great editor.

To review: trans men welcome, beards and testosterone and homemade wieners and all; trans women, no, nope, not welcome, sorry.

But now I have a friend on the inside. In the kitchen. With tattoos! And I don’t know why I love soup so much, but with all due respect to pork, if I could have tattoos on my knuckles I think they would say SOUP and SOUP. Big bowl of steamy, sopping noodles on my belly … but it’s always only a dream because as much as I love tattoos, and seeing them on other people and thinking about them on me, and soup, I can’t take the pain, personally, like I said.

So … "Do you regret any of them? Your tattoos?" I asked.

Her bowl of pho was way bigger than my hot and sour shrimp soup, yet she was almost finished and I was just getting started. I’m a slow eater.

She thought about it. "No," she said, finally, tentatively. Then: "Maybe ‘pork pies’ instead of ‘pork chop.’"

But that’s editorial. That ain’t regret.

Pork butt, pork buns, pork soup, pork meat, pork beef, more pork, I thought, savoring my pineapples, tomatoes, and celery. Sometimes with shrimp and sometimes with catfish, I’ve been ordering canh chua for as long as I’ve been eating in Vietnamese restaurants, and it hadn’t occurred to me until now to ask for noodles too.

The waitressperson had seemed delighted by this suggestion, and I was certainly delighted by the outcome. Only it came out in two separate bowls, and one reason I was so far behind was because it took me 10 minutes to decide whether to add the noodles to the soup, or the soup to the noodles.

Anyway, it was great, and nobody was in no hurries. And I left when I left with a sloshy stomach that worked weirdly well on the soccer field. At least at first. I scored a goal early, then kind of went to sleep in the grass and dreamed about doughnuts. *

PHO CLEMENT

Daily, 10 a.m.–10 p.m.

239 Clement, SF

(415) 379-9008

Takeout available

Beer and wine

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Ding dong, Falwell’s dead

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By Steven T. Jones
We all hate to speak ill of the dead, but my reaction to the news that Rev. Jerry Falwell have died was: Whoopee!!! Apparently, I’m not alone in wanting to dance on this hatemonger’s grave. Check of the comments to the NYT blog. My favorite was “bury him deep.”

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/14/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/14/07): 145 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday. 5 U.S. soldiers were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

145 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday, according to Anti war.com.


98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,610 – 69,658: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 13 May 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/44/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

Five U.S. Soldiers were killed today according to the Associated Press.

Three U.S. Soldiers were abducted Saturday and an al-Qaida front group claims it has captured them and has warned the United States to stop searching for them, according to the Associated Press.

3,643: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.04.html
Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/14/07): So far, $425 billion for the U.S., $53 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Marginalizing Theresa Sparks

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By Tim Redmond

The Chronicle was a day late with the news of what went on at the Police Commission Wednesday night, and its story today was stunning in how it missed the point. Is it not at all worthy of mention that, for the first time in the history of the United States, a transgender person became president of a big-city police commission?

No, apparently not for the Chron, which instead refered to new president Theresa Sparks as “chief executive officer of sex-toy retailer Good Vibrations.” The person who she defeated for the top job, Joe Marshall, was referred to as “a nationwide expert on juvenile justice.”

No mention in this story of Sparks rather remarkable life and her qualifications for the job. (That info couldn’t have been too hard to find; it was right in the Chron’s own archives.)

My opinion? Outgoing president Louise Renne has been trying to marginalize Sparks and undermine her authority before she can even get started. Robert Haaland has a nice analysis in Leftinsf.

Full disclosure: My domestic partner is acting director of the Office of Citizen Complaints, which means she works for the Police Commission.

Istanbul May 11, 2007

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

CNN today was drumming on with news of Tony Blair going and Gordon Brown coming in as prime minister of Great Britain. The Turkish Press was reporting that the national elections here had been moved up three months to July 22, and this surprised the political parties, who were alarmed and said they were forced to bring in the professionals to help them carry on effective campaigns during the short period left before the election. The Turkish Daily News, Turkey’s English daily, reported that there was no space left on the TV stations or on the billboards and that campaign ads would be competing with ice cream manufacturers.
On the plane coming in, Spiro Vryonis sat next to associate pubublisher Jean Dibble and filled her in on the elections from his perspective as a Byzantine scholar. Vryonis, retired director of the center for the study of Hellenism in Sacramento, told her that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan supported his Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul for president. “They get along like two dogs until someone throws a bone between them,” he said.
Meanwhile, I found good advice in Time Out Istanbul, the city-living guide in English. It wrote about the art of Keyif, which translates as “a pleasurable state of idle relaxation.” The article said that Keyif has been honed down to an art form by the Trurks and laid out 10 ways of experiencing Keyif the Turkish way. My favorite was the idea of walking aimlessly along the Bosthorus, the body of water seperating Asia from Europe. It said that “you’ll be surprised how relaxing the Oriental art of walking around with no destination is.” The 58th International Press Institute world congress and general assembly starts tomorrow. So I think I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon doing Keyif. B3

Fresh fruit from old punks

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

FULL CIRCLE Once upon a time, at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, the Dead Kennedys blew the Clash off the stage. I think it was early spring 1980. I didn’t pay much attention to dates in those days, but I remember this much — I was there.

On that night the DKs delivered their fat, funny broadsides with a joyous abandon that few bands of the era could match. Vocalist Jello Biafra — who finished his set drenched in sweat and wearing only his underwear’s elastic waistband — was simply inspired. The group was tight as a drum, and their material — most of which appeared on Fresh Fruits for Rotting Vegetables (Alternative Tentacles, 1980) — was first-rate. Songs such as "Holiday in Cambodia" and "California Über Alles" were politically sharp and lifted by the group’s sarcastic humor — which is to say the band delivered a hilarious, politically pointed good time.

The Clash never got cozy with their American audience. That evening they were self-conscious and too obviously under control — burdened by political points rather than delivering them. The band’s hard-edged working class–oriented politics, which evolved into complex internationalism, was hard for many to access. For comparison, try finding music by the Bay Area’s Dils, whose somewhat dry, hunt-and-peck rhetoric was as close to a domestic analogue as the Clash spawned.

That was nearly 30 years ago. Today Joe Strummer’s dead, Topper Headon looks dead, the DKs — minus Biafra — are an oldies act, and Biafra is an outspoken spoken word artist who, on his latest three-CD opus, In the Grip of Official Treason, compares DK guitarist East Bay Ray to deposed California governor Gray Davis.

Still, the Clash’s music holds up — as does Biafra’s delight with the absurdities of America’s hypocrisies. Our safe American homes don’t feel quite so secure, and bad news keeps leaking through cracks in the wall, which makes checking in with the Clash and Biafra relevant. The former’s somewhat vestigial but still cool Singles Box (Sony) was released late last year (there are so many discs that you could drop a few behind, say, a CD case and not miss ’em for a month or three). The compilation is simply superb, especially because it revives much of the band’s pre–London Calling material.

Nearly 30 years down the road, the Clash’s material has aged little. Perhaps the band just wanted fame, and the principals were as ignorant as the rest of us. Julien Temple’s recent documentary about Strummer, The Future Is Unwritten, undercuts that premise. But even the most cynical punks tended to clam up when it came to the Clash. To say the band wasn’t about albums before and after 1979’s fabulous London Calling (Sony) is a cop-out. Combat Rock (Sony, 1982) was a fully realized and wildly popular triumph, as much as three-disc Sandinista (Sony, 1981) was kind of a soporific mess. Nevertheless, punk rock — for aesthetic and financial reasons — wasn’t primarily about making albums.

Which means that hearing the Clash’s singles, along with the B-sides, as streamlined things unto themselves places a person right in step with what mattered from the only band that mattered. Just give a listen to "White Riot" or their simply brilliant cover of the Bobby Fuller Four’s "I Fought the Law."

Do you have to own this collection? Well, if you’ve got most of the band’s material, you can pass. This one might be best appreciated by fiends, collectors, and the idle rich. Yet it’s amazing how satisfying this music is, and not as a nostalgic exercise in golden protest. The Clash, born in defiant reaction against the musical mainstream, never made peace with it, their major-label contract and midcareer success notwithstanding. Their music delivers.

After all these years — and at this awfully nervous moment in history — it’s also a good time to consider Biafra’s new spoken word collection, a seriously timely 210-plus minutes of sardonic, smart, and occasionally funny political commentary. When he exited the DKs, Biafra drifted away from music as the principal vehicle for his wit and insight. Although he never moved far from punk, his work today seems to follow in the footsteps of social critics such as Paul Krassner.

On Grip (Alternative Tentacles), which consists of live material from various performances, Biafra offers uncommon observations about common household pests such as George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the wars on Iraq and on terror, and other familiar American vulgarities. Careening through a club while the Dead Kennedys were playing doesn’t, in most respects, share much with sitting down and listening to Biafra tear into the fabric of imperial America. What hasn’t changed, however, are the drive and acerbic wit that Biafra brings to the stage — then and now. *

DIRKFEST

Jello Biafra MCs the celebration of Dirk Dirksen’s life, with SF Mutant All Stars, the Contractions, White Trash Debutantes, No Alternative, and others

June 8, 8 p.m., $25

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

Nude beaches

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› culture@sfbg.com

In 1967, Northern California gave birth to America’s first nude beach, at San Gregorio, near Santa Cruz. Now, 40 years later, there’s great news coming from the sand: in the biggest surge in more than a decade, clothing-optional beaches and other skinny-dipping sites are booming once again. Check out our miniguide below. And in the near future, visit an expanded version on the web that includes our unveiling of a pristine cove near Capitola and directions to a place where you can take a naked full-moon hike.

The one bummer? The popular Red White and Blue Beach, in Santa Cruz County, is closing in the wake of the retirement of owner Ralph Edwards.

San Francisco County

LAND’S END BEACH


Tucked away among craggy cliffs, patches of sand, and some of the Bay Area’s best scenery, a nude beach is the last thing you’d expect to find within a short walk of the end of Geary Boulevard. But on warm days, Land’s End usually draws dozens of visitors.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to the end of Geary, and park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. A hundred yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, rises and falls, and eventually becomes the width of a road. Don’t take the road on the right, which leads to a golf course. Instead, keep going past another bench, and as the trail turns right, take a left toward a group of dead trees. Where there’s a stairway with a Dogs Must Be Leashed sign, descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Alternately, follow the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot a quarter mile until you reach a bench, then take the trail there. It’s rough in spots, and at the end you’ll scramble over rocks.

THE BEACH Rocks and little watery grottoes. Look for some good sandy areas away from the beach’s entrance. For the best sunbathing spots, walk west (left). Some visitors build little rock windbreaks, which provide protection from blowing sand.

THE CROWD The quarter-mile-long cove gets up to 30 visitors on the warmest days, with up to 80 percent gay male usage being fairly standard. One visitor counted six or so nudes, all men, during a May visit.

PROBLEMS Long walk, random "sex patrols" by rangers, reports of drug use, public sex on trails and nearby. Fog and wind. Quite rocky. Swimming not allowed. Trails other than the main one are unsafe and may be closed and have poison oak.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH


Overrun by fans undeterred by its slippery and often dangerous trails, the Golden Gate Bridge Beach usually turns into a mob scene on summer weekends. The waves don’t break as hard here as at Baker Beach, so on the nicest days in low tide, you can go out up to 50 yards. A favorite activity: watching the sunset while staring toward the site’s namesake, the Golden Gate Bridge. But don’t visit if you’re looking for privacy and solitude. "I had to stop going there because it’s such a pickup scene," frequent visitor Joseph Friday says.

Also known as Nasty Boy Beach and Marshall’s Beach, the shoreline here features a trio of adjacent coves. In the spring, check for beautiful flowers on the bluffs. Drawbacks include some poison oak on the path (often trimmed back by volunteers), which is otherwise unmaintained and becomes a muddy bluish goo after rainstorms. Golden Gate National Recreational Area rangers strongly recommend that visitors stay away from the trails and avoid swimming.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to North Baker Beach, park in the main lot, and walk north along Lincoln Boulevard, passing the sand ladder that leads to North Baker. Just north of the ladder trail, look for a dirt road with a gate leading to Battery Crosby. Follow it, then hike up the trail immediately on the south (left) side of the old fort to the top of the bluff. Rangers recently added some rails that make the path a little easier to follow. Take the trail straight west as it goes downhill toward the ocean (wear long sleeves and pants to protect against poison oak). At a small crumbling concrete bulkhead, the trail heads north along the bluffs and eventually down a shorter, steep section with small steps cut into the gully. The main path ends at the south end of Golden Gate Bridge Beach.

THE BEACH Three small rocky beaches located below Fort Winfield Scott. The main beach trail tends to be slippery, heavily eroded, and dangerous.

THE CROWD During the week, Golden Gate Bridge Beach attracts dozens of users. On weekends, (mostly nude) usage soars to between 100 and 300 visitors on the hottest days.

PROBLEMS Slippery, crumbling, sometimes muddy, and poison oak–edged trails. Trash, rocks, wind, fog, unsafe swimming conditions, sex on the beach, too many people often jammed into too little space.

San Mateo County

DEVIL’S SLIDE


Now that its main access road, landslide-prone Highway 1, is finally reopened, visitors are flocking back to one of California’s only state beaches that officially permit nudity. Called Gray Whale Cove State Beach, the site known to many users as Devil’s Slide draws maybe 200 people on warm days — about 25 percent of them nude.

Nude use is especially popular on the north end of the long sandy shore. If you like Frisbee, it’s easy to find somebody to play with at the cove. Signs, though, warn about dangerous surf. There’s no lifeguard on duty. Dogs are prohibited. The beach is open all year and is one of the only California state parks that doesn’t accept an Annual Day Use Pass.

HOW TO FIND IT From San Francisco take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s Restaurant in Linda Mar, turn east (inland, or left) on an unmarked road, which will take you to the beach’s parking lot, from which a 146-step staircase leads to the sand. Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the east (right) 1.2 miles north of the Chart House restaurant in Montara.

THE BEACH A 300-foot-long site surrounded by orangish sandstone cliffs on one side and the beautiful Pacific Ocean on the other. Devil’s Slide is a great place to read, tan, jog, play Frisbee, and watch (true to its state beach name) gray whales, pelicans, and surfers.

THE CROWD Tourists, families, surfers, and naturists all use the beach.

PROBLEMS Influx of suited visitors, cold water, fog, wind, long walk to the beach. Landslides sometimes close Highway 1, three great white sharks seen in the ’80s. Parking fee. Some sexual activity reported in north cove area in recent past. Rangers have made a few arrests.

SAN GREGORIO


A visit to San Gregorio combines history with recreation. Approaching its 40th anniversary, clothing-optional, privately run San Gregorio is America’s oldest nude beach, founded right next door to San Gregorio State Beach, where nudity is not allowed. The huge property attracts some nude and suited straight couples, singles, and families. First-timers are sometimes a bit put off by the driftwood structures on the sandy slope leading down to the beach, which are used by some visitors as sex condos. Others relish San Gregorio’s scenery. There are two miles of soft sand and tide pools to explore, as well as a lagoon, a lava tube, and, if you look close enough on the cliffs, the remains of an old railroad.

HOW TO FIND IT From Tunitas Creek Way, south of Half Moon Bay, the beach is about a mile up Highway 1. Around 100 yards north of Highway 84 on 1, take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign. Go a few hundred feet, and just after the 55 mph sign on your right, turn left on the dirt road (look for the address 19429 above the fence) and head past a grassy field to the parking lot, where you’ll be asked to pay an entrance fee. Take the long path from the lot to the sand; everything north of the trail’s end is clothing optional. The beach is also accessible from the San Gregorio State Beach parking area to the south; from there hike about a half mile north. Take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign to the parking lot.

THE BEACH You’ll find caves, cliffs, driftwood structures, and a beach full of clean, rolling sand. Pets are OK (though dogs are not allowed on weekends or holidays); fires, cameras, and overnight camping are banned. Swimming is not recommended. There are toilets in the parking lot.

THE CROWD On the warmest days, 50 to 200 visitors may be spread along the sprawling beach, which is so large that it never feels crowded. Straight couples and families tend to hang out on the south end of the beach, gay men on the north side.

PROBLEMS Fee, wind, riptides, cold water, summer fog, sex on the beach or in driftwood condos, not much of a social atmosphere. *

For more nude beaches, please check out our official guide, which is in the process of being updated.

The waiting wife

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While Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shurd Rice pilots a helicopter over bloodbaths in Iraq, his wife, Jane, peers at crustaceans through a microscope in a Tiburon laboratory 7,500 miles away and tries not to think about what’s happening to her husband.

"I worry more about Shurd’s sanity than his safety," said Rice, a research technician, who recently learned her husband won’t be home from Iraq until Halloween, thanks to a three-month extension of his tour of duty that he found out about on CNN.

"Just like that, they pull the finishing line away," Rice told the Guardian. "It’s soul destroying. I can’t watch the news anymore, waiting for a withdrawal time line that just turns into dust."

Rice, who was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, says she’s "used to crazy leaders…. So Bush made an error, but to do it over and over again? And his refusal to discuss getting out of Iraq leaves me speechless."

Losing herself in the world of science doesn’t protect Rice from learning about day-to-day horrors in Iraq, since the details spill into her husband’s frequent calls and e-mails.

In a recent e-mail, he wrote about atrocities that happened in an Iraqi village after an improvised explosive device blew up one of the commanders in the Iraqi Army.

"Somehow [the Iraqi Army] knew [whoever detonated the IED] was from a nearby Iraqi village," Shurd wrote, "so they rolled in there to ‘interrogate’ the village and find the trigger man." The interrogation consisted of "beating the women and children of the village, until they finally gave up the fella," he wrote. "But the original call for medivac came in for the trigger man himself, and the injuries were as follows: multiple gun shot wounds to the feet and hands, and rectal bleeding. That’s business Iraqi style."

For Rice, living in the Bay Area, where Shurd grew up and used to be a musician, means she faces painful judgments of her husband’s decision to enlist.

"This attitude that because you signed up, you must deserve it, you have it coming — that’s hard to field, but people like Shurd are the only ones standing between the self-righteous people and the draft," she says. "And Shurd turns all judgments on their heads. He’s the most nonjudgmental person I know. He’s always giving me a hard time for judging, so when people say, ‘Where’s your husband?’ and I say, ‘Iraq,’ and I see that look in their eyes, I think, oh my god! They’re judging him."

Rice met Shurd in South Africa when she was 18 and two weeks out of high school.

"I was working at a restaurant where I had to wear a big old 16th-century dress, and Shurd was painting a mural on the wall. He was so impressive, this world-traveling artist guy."

As a South African, Rice said, she didn’t have any preconceived notions about the military when Shurd joined the US Army two years after they met.

"It sounds naive now, but at the time it seemed like an adventure," says Rice, who, along with her husband, never imagined that Sept. 11, 2001, was lurking around the corner.

As Shurd wrote in a recent e-mail, "Guess I wasn’t paying attention enough to politics to see that coming. But I knew a vehicle for blind patriotism when I saw it and was sure someone was gonna pay, and a lot of people were gonna get paid because of it, and not only was I gonna be along for the ride, like it or not, I was sure to have a front row to see us do something foolish."

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

San Francisco district attorneys have never been known for fighting political corruption. You don’t see politicians or corporate CEOs doing the perp walk around here — and trust me, it’s not because there’s a lack of criminal activity. Over the past 20 years, I’ve personally written or edited at least two dozen stories that involved clear evidence of lawbreaking by prominent San Francisco citizens, and not one of them has ever been held to account in a court of law.

(OK, I’ll give Terence Hallinan credit for Fajitagate; at least he tried. But it turned out to be an embarrassment when the highest-ranking cops walked away free and clear. And even Hallinan couldn’t — or wouldn’t — lay a glove on Willie Brown.)

Kamala Harris, who will be up for reelection next year, clearly has higher political ambitions. When I saw her take the stage with Sen. Barack Obama at the state Democratic convention in San Diego and he introduced her as one of his most prominent supporters, I could almost see the wheels turning: Federal Judge Kamala Harris. White House counsel Kamala Harris. Even Attorney General Kamala Harris. If Obama doesn’t win, she’s still on a lot of short lists for higher office.

But if she wants to be another Eliot Spitzer, she’s got to, well, be Eliot Spitzer. She’s got to be willing to take a firm hand on political crimes, pursuing and investigating violations of public trust as if that were the most important part of her job.

And she can start right now with the San Francisco Community College District.

It’s been more than a month since the news broke that an associate vice chancellor at City College diverted $10,000 in public money to a private campaign fund set up to pass a college bond act. Nobody’s been charged with any crime, but it seems to me there are some real questions not just about propriety but about legality here. And it seems to me, as someone who has watched that snake pit over there for a long time now, that it’s highly — highly — unlikely that a junior-level college official acting entirely on his own would have shifted 10 grand into a campaign committee that had close ties to elected members of the community college board.

Nobody in the DA’s Office will confirm or deny any investigation, which is standard practice. But I bet an aggressive district attorney who started digging out there on Phelan Avenue might shovel up some serious dirt. Just a thought, Kamala.

I’m beginning to think that our candidate for mayor ought to be Sup. Ross Mirkarimi.

Part of that is, frankly, political reality: Matt Gonzalez shows no sign of wanting to run at this point, and it’s getting late. Sup. Aaron Peskin doesn’t want to do it. There’s talk about former mayor Art Agnos, but I don’t buy it: Agnos would have a lot of fences to mend from his administration, and he’s not the type to apologize.

I hate to say that "leaves" Mirkarimi, because he’s actually a good candidate. He’s smart and full of energy and can take on the mayor on street crime: Newsom is going after panhandlers while Mirkarimi is trying to do something about the appalling murder rate. He’s only been in elected office a couple years, but then, Obama (who is Mirkarimi’s age, to the day) has been in the US Senate a couple years, and he could be the next president. Worth thinking about.

Arnold’s high-speed spin

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arnold.jpg
By Steven T. Jones
After being called out by the Guardian as the main obstacle to building a high-speed rail system in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote an op-ed in the Fresno Bee over the weekend claiming to enthusiastically support the project. That’s good news and a sign that project supporters are making progress. Unfortunately, the op-ed continues the governor’s deceptive approach to the issue as it omits inconvenient facts and makes false claims.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/7/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/7/07): 8 U.S. soldiers killed yesterday. 42 Iraqi civilians killed yesterday.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

8 U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq yesterday, according to the Washington Post.

3,618: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.04.html

Iraqi civilians:

At least 42 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday when a car bomb exploded in a busy market in Bayaa, according to the Washington Post.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

62,841 – 68,868: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 6 May 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/43/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.


1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/7/07): So far, $423 billion for the U.S., $53 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Chronicle applies their “be fair to PG&E” news principle to a major study on the beneficial impact of small business in San Francisco

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday May 23, as I was preparing my introductory remarks for our third annual small business awards ceremony at Anchor Steam Brewery, I found a timely article buried in that day’s business page of the San Francisco Chronicle that helped illustrate what I call the Chronicle’s “Be Fair to PG&E” news principle.

The article Local merchants reinvest in city, I pointed out, reported on a major $l5,000 study that was specially commissioned by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance and provided valuable ammunition to independents in their endless battle with the chain stores. The group made the study available exclusively to the Chronicle in hopes that the paper would do a major story, play it up, and give the small business community a much needed boost to a large number of readers.

Instead, I noted, the Chronicle, owned by the Hearst chain out of New York and a champion of big business and big development and big chains, gave the story its patented “let’s be fair to PG@E” approach or in this case “let’s be fair to the chains.” The Chronicle buried the story in its prime burial spot at the bottom of the right hand page of the business section where it buries stories it doesn’t like: for example, the Reilly story on his settlement with the Hearst and Singleton chains, which we called a Reilly victory (see Guardian coverage and other blogs.)
I held up the page and noted that AMD and the Gap and IBM all got the big heads above the fold.
And the small business story got the “let’s be fair to PG&E approach” with a much smaller head below the fold, “Local merchants reinvest in city, their study says.” Then, right there in the subhead was the clinker right out of the PG&E/big chain playbook that read, “Retail federation spokesman skeptical of survey’s claims,” buttressed further down in the story with some nice counter quotes, and a telling phrase that, gosh, golly, gee, those tricky merchants out there in the neighborhoods “acknowledged they see the study as a competitive weapon.” Wow! Pow! Wow!

Let’s be fair to PG&E, says the Chronicle, and applies its news principle to a study on the value of small business over chains in San Francisco

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Thursday May 23, as I was preparing my introductory remarks for our third annual small business awards ceremony at Anchor Steam Brewery, I found a timely article buried in that day’s business page of the San Francisco Chronicle that helped illustrate what I call the Chronicle’s “Let’s be fair to PG&E” news principle.

The article, I pointed out, reported on a major $l5,000 study that was specially commissioned by the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance and provided valuable ammunition to independents in their endless battle with the chain stores. The study was made available exclusively to the Chronicle in hopes that the paper would do a major story, play it up, and give the small business community a much needed boost to a large number of readers.
It was timed for Small Business Week San Francisco 2007 (May 5-12), but the Chronicle was more interested in putting out a special ad supplement with no mention of the study, stuffed with deadly proclamations and boilerplate. Significantly, there were virtually no ads from small business. The rates were too high and the format too boring.

Instead, I noted, the Chronicle, owned by the Hearst chain out of New York and a champion of big business and big development and big chains, gave the story its patented “Let’s be fair to PG&E” approach or in this case “Let’s be fair to the chains.” The Chronicle buried the story in its prime burial plot at the bottom of the right hand page of the business section where it buries stories it doesn’t like: for example, the Reilly story on his settlement with the Hearst and Singleton chains, which we called a Reilly victory because he forced the chains to compete (see Guardian coverage and other blogs.)

Fox news can’t handle penises

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By Tim Redmond

Or even a coupla pretty tame crotch shots. Check out the anchor having a laughing fit.

What’s the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the Hearst and Singleton papers? For starters, the Journal played the Murdoch bid to buy the paper on its front page

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Yesterday, when I was going back and forth with my source in Contra Costa County on how Singleton papers covered the Reilly settlement story in the East Bay, he mentioned that Murdoch had made an unsolicited bid to buy the Wall Street Journal. My source, a natural born news junkie, monitors breaking news during the day. I leafed through my copy of the Journal and couldn’t find any such story and promptly forgot about it.

This morning, opening up the Journal, I found that the paper played the story as its lead on the front page, under a two column headline, “Murdoch’s Surprise Bid: $5 Billion for Dow Jones, High-Premium Offer Spotlights the Family That Controls Publisher.” Unlike the Hearst and Singleton press, which used the bury and mangle approach to its big media stories involving their own monopoly deal, the Journal played the story as the big story it was.

The front page story jumped to a full page inside the first section. And a front page box titled “In the Headlines” listed three inside stories: “Murdoch sees digital future” and “Bancroft family holds control through dual-class stock” and
“Offer reflects lofty premium for a strategic property.” There was also a chronology box, “From Handwritten to Online: l25 Years of Journalism,” on the front page of the “Money and Investing section” along with two major stories.

Eyes on the prize

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The recent news that a food writer from Los Angeles won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism puts us on notice that food writing at its best is an art form – also that LA is a serious food town, loath though we may be to admit it. The southland has access to all sorts of local agricultural bounty, a nearby wine country (in Santa Barbara County), and a polyglot population that represents much of the world. It also has something we don’t have – an international border just miles away, with a genuinely different culture on the other side. This must be massively stimuutf8g.

Criticism is a minor art, secondary and derivative – there must be some larger, primary subject at hand to examine and consider – but its subordinate position doesn’t make it less worthy. Authentic food criticism tends to overcome this limitation anyway, since, handled in a certain way, it becomes a species of social or cultural criticism, a meditation on how people live their lives. As anyone who’s traveled abroad will know, one’s first and indelible experiences of other cultures often have to do with food: what it is, how it is grown or gathered, how it is prepared and presented. If it is true that one feels most American when outside of America, then perhaps it is also true that our industrial-food folly becomes most apparent to us when we are sitting in some cafe in a faraway land, awash in local food habits and practices that are hundreds or thousands of years old, and no one has heard of Velveeta.

The difference between criticism and reviewing is a segment of the border between art and craft, with the former more keenly attentive to wider and deeper meanings. Many of our food-involved locals abide by a credo of living to eat, but because this is true to some extent of every animal on the planet, its meaning seems a little watery to me and appears to involve mainly the hunt for the "best" version of this or that. I have no particular complaint with this, just as I have no quarrel with gearheads or fanciers of pedigreed dogs. But, as with other forms of monomania, it does have a flattening effect, reducing the world to a single dimension. LA is flat, but it isn’t just flat.

Paul Reidinger

> paulr@sfbg.com

Tow-away zones that lie

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> news@sfbg.com

Parking a car is notoriously difficult in San Francisco, where you can be towed for blocking a driveway, occupying a bus zone, failing to move your vehicle at certain times of the day, or being in a posted construction zone.

But many of those construction zone tow-away signs may be fake, a problem that the city does little to enforce and the public has a hard time discerning.

Contractors sometimes simply purchase a sign for $2 and post it without the legal right to do so. Often it’s an innocent error by out-of-town contractors who don’t know to apply for a street space parking permit. Other times it can be an interim step by contractors waiting for the right to reserve a spot outside their job site or by contractors who never met with a Department of Public Works inspector to determine the hours and scope of their parking needs.

Theoretically, parkers are free to ignore these fake signs. But it’s hard for the public to tell a fake sign from a real one unless they contact the city. And who does that while hunting for a parking space?

The streets are considered part of the public’s right-of-way. In addition to a construction permit, a street space permit is necessary if contractors will block the right-of-way, although underground services such as utility companies remain exempt.

The DPW issued 9,020 street space permits in 2006, according to spokesperson Christine Falvey. That year 93 citations were issued to property owners whose contractors did not have valid street space permits; all of those citations were prompted by citizen complaints.

"Street space violations are not proactive, they are reactive," said Dan McKenna, deputy manager of the DPW’s Bureau of Street Use and Mapping, which handles these permits and violations.

In other words, a construction zone tow-away sign will never be challenged if the public does not ask the DPW or the Department of Building Inspection, which has its own street space permit desk, to go out and validate it.

That’s what happened at the corner of Haight and Shrader streets last October when Service Concrete of Daly City got a valid permit for street space and sidewalk repair but failed to meet with a DPW inspector. Contractors often want to claim more spaces, for more hours, than what the inspectors may ultimately be willing to approve.

Service Concrete never scheduled a meeting with the department, nor did it register the times of enforcement. Therefore, it never had a legal right to tow anyone or reserve those parking spots, according to DPW deputy manager John Kwong.

"They never contacted the department to schedule a meeting for the street space occupancy," Kwong said. "Therefore, the street space permit is not considered valid. They’re not supposed to occupy." But they did, and the job was completed with at least four parking meters marked for tow-away.

A call to the phone number on the permit resulted in the contractor telling the Guardian, "I don’t remember. Even if you tell me, I won’t remember. I can’t comment on anything on this."

In April, the NEQE construction company received a building permit for a seismic retrofit at 240 Golden Gate Ave. It requested a street space permit May 11 and immediately posted no-parking signs. However, it did not have a site inspection, and the actual street space permit wasn’t issued until May 26, according to Nick Elsner, senior plan checker with the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping.

The initial tow-away signs were for seven days a week, 24 hours a day until November, although the permit on file said the contractor needed the space from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays. The contractor eventually received 60 linear feet for three parking spaces for the limited time frame.

"They didn’t put it in the computer," a representative of NEQE told us. "What happened on the job site, we put up the sign for the parking permit. And then they give us notice. And I had to go back to the city because the parking department is different from the city. We showed all the documents, and it was fine."

Neither Service Concrete nor NEQE were cited for improper postings of their tow-away signs. Most violators are never cited. Elsner told us it is obvious that contractors often ignore the law, which, if violated, carries a penalty of up to $1,000 per day.

"When we learn about a tow zone without a permit, we go out and enforce the law," he said. "But we only have four inspectors."

At the height of summer last year, when construction was in full swing, there was a three-week backlog for the verification process, according to Elsner.

Getting street space used to be automatic, until the Board of Supervisors amended Section 724 of the Public Works Code in 2002. Before, the price of a building permit determined the length of time contractors could usurp parking spaces.

"In the past the street space durations, the amount of time you were given for a building space, was directly related to the cost of your project," Elsner said. "If you had a $40 million project, you got four years’ parking. So if you finished in three years, you had a year of free parking. The Board of Supervisors looked at this and decided there was something wrong. Now permits are issued on a monthly basis, six-month maximum. You pay per 20 linear feet, basically one parking space, $82.08."

Elsner said the public cannot tell simply by reading a sign whether it has been legally posted. "They may have filled the sign out correctly, but that doesn’t mean they have a permit," he said. The revised ordinance requires temporary tow-away signs to have the permit number on them in addition to the contractor’s name and phone number. But some contractors don’t bother to apply.

"Our biggest problem we have is with roofers," Elsner observed. "They get a permit to do a roof and say they don’t need a street space. What do you mean you don’t need a street space permit? Either the building has a huge setback or they intend to fly in by helicopter."

Elsner said the street space ordinance has no set hours or days a contractor may use a street space. "That is worked out with the inspector," he said. "If they are not working, their parking should be for public use."

He said he warns contractors that they are responsible for affixing the signs so they aren’t torn down. If there is no sign, the Department of Parking and Traffic is not obliged to tow.

Every day a new list of valid permits is sent to the DPT tow desk. However, some contractors have learned it is cheaper and easier to buy a few paper signs, fill them out, and tape them up rather than get a valid street permit. A sign costs $1.99 at White Cap Industries, a construction supply company.

Cheryl Duperrault is one of the street improvement inspectors at the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping who respond to public complaints. Of the 93 citations issued in 2006, she wrote 32, nearly a third. Duperrault said she cited contractors who simply posted a fake tow-away sign and never sought a permit.

"That has happened," she said. "I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more than it does. It’s easy to tell whether or not the street space permit is valid because they should have a big white placard visible from the street. It gives the information of the permit." *

The DPW offers a free brochure that describes the process of applying for street and sidewalk permits. The brochure is available at its offices on Stevenson Street or by fax or mail. A permit is required when anyone intends to block the public right-of-way "to construct, improve, excavate, occupy, and/or perform work." There is a hotline (415-554-5810) to see if there is a permit on file. The Bureau of Street Use and Mapping will respond if the public questions a temporary tow-away sign.

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